Operatic and existential

"...at once operatic and existential...."
--Philip Gourevitch, in the Spring, 2013 paper issue of Aperture.

I think best while walking, walk best while thinking. Yesterday I walked and thought all day and a good hunk of the night.

I walked into town to see Happy People, Werner Herzog's latest documentary. It's about sable trappers in the Taiga, the Siberian forest my old cat (still hanging on, still fragile) is named for. If you love landscape photography it's worth a viewing, but it lacks story and (what's the opposite of a chick flick?) is a guy thing. Fishing, trapping, man and his muscle and his dogs against the elements. Best scene is in the trailer--river ice breaking up, a whole world in motion.

I've been reading the latest paper edition of Aperture, which is questioning the very purpose of photography, questioning the magazine's purpose, going into a paper version (that will cost more) and an internet version (that will cost less), and it's got me thinking deeply about photography, the internet, social networking with photographs, what we do here, and how it is changing our lives and our perceptions.

For me the camera is a companion. It is the presence to whom I say, "Look!" It holds the moment with me. Its sensor doesn't always see what I saw, so I come home and find that what I loved best, the camera didn't quite get, but it got something that my eyes missed. I re-discover the moment. And then I pick one for Blip and say to my Blip friends, "Look!" while they are all saying to me, "Look!" and we look and look, search for words, comment. At once operatic and existential.

I am falling behind our time, as I don't have an iPad or an iPhone, don't have any apps, don't do Instagram. The very nature of "reality" is changing because the way people communicate has changed. The purpose of photographs has changed. Are our pictures, seldom printed, no longer in albums, but more widely shared--are they more ephemeral this way or less? Loaded onto the internet and preserved for eternity but in numbers so vast we cannot go back and find them again, are our pictures more ephemeral or less? And what if we pour time and effort into making the best picture we can make, each day? Impermanent as we all are, does it matter what's ephemeral and what's not? All is ephemeral. So what are we doing? Do we think we can hold back time? Do we think we can save it all? Or are we merely making the sparks re-ascend, saying thank you, I love you, goodbye.

Walking home in the dark after the rain, I was stopped by the beauty of that railroad-track fence seen from the other side, at night, with the Fremont Bridge in the distance. It seems at once operatic and existential. I wanted people in it, for scale and interest. I was tired, and I waited and waited, but no one came. So this is it.